Politics 2.0 and the Thirst for Content

In an earlier post I compared Barack Obama's site to Hillary Clinton's. When I wrote that article, Obama had not yet secured the nomination.

Now that he has, I am wondering if his landslide victory had anything to do with his campaign's approach to new (untraditional) media. The campaign seems to have a firm understanding of Web 2.0 practices, and social networking tools.

BarackObama.com is just one aspect of a very well-oiled media machine, another perhaps equally important aspect, is the campaign's Youtube channel. There you can view anything from the candidate's appearances on talk shows, to fully unedited speeches, to the campaign's video team's behind the scenes look on the campaign trail. They have posted over 1000 videos, and they are getting tens of thousands of hits a day.

My generation spends more time on Youtube than on traditional media outlets, and it seems like this 24-hour soundbite news that television networks have been shoving down our throats for years, just doesn't interest us.

We grew up in the age of the soundbite, the age of the slogan, the age of 24-hour news coverage, and it's as if we are tired of it. We don't want soundbites, we want content. Clear, unedited, real content. Obama's campaign doesn't only understand that desire, they are supplying us with the kind of content we crave.

Last night I went to a very interesting talk with Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for Barack Obama. The evening was hosted by frog design, and moderated by Ellen McGirt (who had just written an incredible article for Fast Company called "The Brand Called Obama"). The room was filled with about 80 people, mostly non-traditional media folks.

Chaudhary talked a bit about how the campaign's media team works, the type of people involved, and how easy it is for them to get content out really quickly, since Obama trusts their judgement and expertise.

How incredible...

In most "creative" work places where you have to deal with clients, there is so much management, legal, and red tape in place, getting something approved can take weeks, sometimes even months. So Barack Obama sounds like the ideal client if you ask me, and it shows in the quality of content that's coming out of that campaign.

Chaudhary came from a solid, academic film background. Before he became Obama's director of field production he was adjunct professor of film at NYU. I think a filmmaker's approach to news coverage is inherently different than anyone working in the traditional media news outlets, and it's quite interesting that Obama's campaign chose a filmmaker to take on that role.

As his role was beginning to take shape, and he was traveling back and forth from Chicago to Iowa covering the Iowa caucus, they were pumping out hundreds of videos in a matter of weeks. At first they were posting little clips from Obama's speeches or town hall meetings on Youtube, but pretty soon people were demanding more content. The Obama campaign was surprised at the amount of people that kept asking for the full video.

So they took their cue from social-networking and Web 2.0, and gave the people what they wanted.



Frog posted some fragments from the night here.

Truth in Infographics

At work we keep a private posting area/blog for us to post interesting design work we've found somewhere else as inspiration, or just for a laugh. I have been wanting it to be public, but I guess the power's that be are nervous about some of our clients seeing the content or something. Nothing earth shattering has ever been posted, but I did want to share this funny chain of events between 2 of our Art Directors.

First, Brian posted an infographic he found about Obama's inventive campaign money raising:

No Small Change
June 27th, 2008 · Posted by BrianB · 2 Comments

How Obama Reinvented Campaign Finance

Here’s a little fun info graphic by Xplane illustrating how Barack Obama found a more effective way to raise campaign cash by using the power social networks.



Then Daniel responded with a graphic he created showing how he felt that the infographic was incorrectly displaying size relationships:

Truth in Infographics
DanielK // Jul 4, 2008 at 6:10 pm

I have a visual response that I’d like to title “Truth in Infographics”



Then finally after that Brian posted a hilarious response to end it for once and for all:

In Addition
BrianB // Jul 7, 2008 at 10:13 pm

Bruce Sterling Interview on DesignBoom

When I was working on the "a day in the life of a designer's smart things, 2030" project, I had the pleasure of getting some insight and advice from Bruce Sterling. When we got a little stuck halfway through the writing process he offered his thoughts on how the storyline could evolve.

The story in the diagram takes place in the year 2030, so who better to ask about the future than the man who's been writing design fiction for decades? As I'm sure he's a very busy man, I was amazed that he took an interest to our project at all. And that makes Bruce Sterling pretty cool in my book.

If you've seen our 2030 diagram, and you're not sure who Bruce Sterling is, take a moment to read his interview at DesignBoom, you'll immediately understand why his work served as an inspiration for the piece.

Ladies of the Baseline

When you go to college and you study design, one of the most common exercises in the first typography class is to make people or faces, or sometimes even entire scenes, with the use of only type. Sounds pretty easy maybe, but it's actually quite hard.

Since you can't distort the type (besides resizing), and you have to use the same font for all the letters in the image, your possibilities of creating (believable) images are quite slim.

I remember in class I did a mariachi made of Palatino, other students did self-portraits, animals, family members, famous people, teachers, or friends. Most were pretty horrendous though, and it ended being one of those projects you wouldn't dream of putting in your portfolio (and most did end up in the trash at the end of the semester).

So all designers went through this exercise one way or the other, but unfortunately nobody had the nerve or imagination to do something a bit more risqué like Miss Helvetica Neue over here... ;-)

Some walls in Argentina

This piece seems so effortless, and yet when you think about how long it probably took to actually do it, it really makes your head spin... The sound design is incredible also... Very well done...

I also quite enjoy his illustrations, which are a little disturbing and macabre, and they somehow remind me a lot of daniel johnston's illustrations.

Firefox 3 - Gspace Extension

If you hate Internet Explorer, and have been using Firefox since you realized tabbed browsing makes life a whole lot easier, well, then I hope you have already downloaded the new and improved Firefox 3 (you probably have, on the first day more than 8 million people downloaded it, an all time record). I am not going to get into a discussion about Firefox, IE and Safari, since there are plenty of other outlets for that anger, and that discussion is quite uninteresting to me...

But... Firefox does have a couple of incredible add-ons, fitted to suit your fancy, and I have personally just stumbled upon this very neat new add-on/extension called Gspace.



This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like an FTP host.

It's great for storing/sharing files with your friends. Also very good to backup photos and music files (as you can view/listen to them from Gspace), and handy when you don't have your flash drive with you.

Enjoy! :-)

Brand Tags: Lacoste = Preppy

What's the first thing that pops into your head when you think of Lacoste? or Gap? or MTV? or Apple? Is Google amazing or evil? Is Wikipedia useful or inaccurate? We collectively think AOL sucks and Pumas are cool.

Brands want you to think of them in a certain way, but their image is not entirely controlled by the brand's creative or marketing department. The most amazing logo or slogan might be able to affect your perception slightly, but definitely not entirely.

A bad experience stays with you a lot longer than a pretty logo ever will.

Brand Tags is a cool little experiment on collective brand perception, giving some great insights as to what people really think of brands. Have fun!

Thinking Outside the Dykes

This morning I heard an interesting article on npr about a new architectural initiative to start building on top of water as a preemptive tactic to survive, and live with, climate change and rising sea levels.

You mean like that terrible Kevin Costner movie Waterworld?

Well, not exactly... The idea is that anything you can imagine (from houses, to islands, to skyscrapers, to entire communities) can be built on top of water. It all stemmed from the realization that rising sea levels will prove to be disastrous for most of the world’s most densely populated areas. Since this is something that will likely happen in our lifetime, some very innovative architects are now designing prototypes that will utilize the rising sea level as a building block, instead of fighting it to keep it out, as was traditionally done in the last century with dykes and pumps.

This outlandish and innovative idea is a combination of Dubai's insane desire to be the most architecturally impressive country in the world (they already have the most expensive, and I think ugliest, hotel, and largest indoor ski-slope), and the ambition of historically water-obsessed Dutch architects.

My question is, who owns water, how do you buy it, and who's selling?

A Very Disillusioned Philippe Starck

The german magazine Die Zeit recently published a very interesting interview with famous french designer Philippe Starck on the heels of his much quoted speech at the TED conference last year. In it he proclaims that his sort of design – is dead. Not only does he say it's dead, he actually feels ashamed for being a producer of materiality, and is pondering retirement for a life with more meaning.

For all young start-up designers out there, being Philippe Starck, or becoming the Philippe Starck of the 21st century sounds like a beautiful dream. He's famous, he's wealthy, his tastes are trusted and sought out, he's designed some of the most beautiful, interesting and simple objects. He's designed for Microsoft, Aprilia and Target. He's published, he's quoted, his speaking fees are astronomical... He's done it all.

But... Is that enough nowadays? We are now in the midst of a backlash against excessive and unnecessary design, and the interesting thing is that it is mostly coming from the design world itself. Designers are starting to realize that their jobs are, well, unnecessary. We are tired of ourselves. Tired of creating useless things that will pollute our planet, tired of selling lies so some giant company can become even richer. We're tired of intentionally confusing consumers, and purposefully distracting them with shiny colors, eye-candy and slogans.

Designers are looking for meaning. Designers are trying to make the word design less synonymous with websites and products, and more synonymous with innovation and ideas. Ideas that will help society, organize poorly designed experiences, inform consumers properly, and give the people the tools they need to create their own experiences.

If even Philippe Starck can't find meaning in his job anymore, it's time to re-think what design really means, and how we can use it for good.

When Big Corporations Have a Sense of Humor

HEMA, Hollands biggest department store, sells everything your house-hold can desire. From cups to umbrellas, to electronics –it's Hollands equivalent to a Wal-Mart, or K-Mart. The only difference is that HEMA has a sense of humor, and Wal-Mart and K-Mart obviously don't.

Wal-Mart has this incredibly predictable site, with a quite ridiculous tag line which promises: "Save money. Live Better." (??!!) Then of course there is the boring flash marquees with more of the same unimaginative copy and stock photography of "happy people" and the rip-off Apple mirror effect for their product photography. It's a fad Apple started, and sites like this were quick to copy (I'm sure Photoshop will come out with a quick mirror effect soon). To be honest Wal-Mart's site is really not even worth a rant, since the site is so unmemorable and ordinary.

That's not what this post is about though. This post is about HEMA's site, and what can happen when a company doesn't take itself too seriously, doesn't follow other site's fads, and ends up making the experience of going to their site a little more memorable.

Anyways... Go check it out!

Misdirection

Two interesting tests, I highly recommend you take:
(make sure you have the sound turned on for both)



After you're done with that one, go and check out your hearing with the Hørseltest.



Interesting results right? It's hard to get people to sit through an entire ad, or promo and actually have them pay attention. We're just not that interested in one sided communication (from the company to the consumer) anymore. We want it to be a dialogue, we want to participate, and these ads play into that exact desire.

These ads work because it promises to tell us something about ourselves. Though it's a bit of a bait and switch, people are drawn to things that are interactive and asks them to participate (let's see how aware I am, let's see how my hearing is).

Misdirection is something magicians use for entertainment value, psychologists use to understand how the brain works, and marketers can use to make you pay active attention in a world where most messages just ask for passive consumption.

Get Some!

On Valentine's Day there were people all around NYC handing out free condoms. They've been doing this for a couple of years now, and I didn't think much of it until I looked a little closer at the packaging and saw that it said "Get Some"...



Thanks to Yves Behar and his team for making me laugh on my morning commute... When copy just makes sense, AND makes you laugh, it makes the world a better place ;-)

Obama for Design!! (...or President)

Tuesday Obama surpassed Hillary in the amounts of delegates he's accrued, and everyone's now interested in the fact that he might actually stand a chance to take the democratic nomination.

I'm not a citizen, so I can't vote. I think they're both fine, and I'm fine with either of them winning, but from my perspective Obama has already won. Not because he is the better candidate, or because he will make a better president, or because his change campaign is sending positive and hopeful messages, he has already won because his campaign truly mastered the web with the cunning use of great design, great copy-writing, a deep understanding of social-networking tools, and an active participation on social-networking sites.

Hillary's website is terrible. The color scheme, is very, I don't know, blaah, washed-out, old, 1980's looking. Her homepage has a cheezy and boring cut-out photograph of her, and her icons feel outdated, like AOL designed them in 1999. There are hundreds of different font sizes, colors and typefaces, which makes the whole thing feel incredibly cluttered. I don't know where I am supposed to look first, since the grid is poorly designed, and the hierarchy in the site is way off.

One of the Art Directors at work walked over to my computer and we had a little chuckle over Hillary's site, and according to her it's pretty much Kerry's site from four years ago. I haven't been able to find Kerry's old site anywhere, not even a screenshot or anything, but if it is pretty much the same, well, then that's pretty cheap! With all that money they raised you would imagine they could've spent some of it on design.

Obama's site on the other hand literally feels like a breath of fresh air. A simple, elegant and consistent color palette. A nice quiet grid with consistent open padding, with all the tools and options off to the right (obviously a cue taken from blogs). It's soothing, it's clean, it's modern, it's pretty much everything he's trying to make you feel through his campaign.

You can tell his site was made by designers. Not just any designers, but good designers. His site has been extremely successful at branding his internet presence as young, modern, hip, and with-the-times.

Hillary's only presence on social-networking sites is MySpace, Facebook (there's also a anti-Hillary Facebook page which has more members than her actual Facebook page), YouTube, Flickr, and Eons. They way it's displayed on her site is incredibly unimaginative, and I dare you to count the amount of fonts below.



Obama on the other hand is pretty much on every social-networking site and tool you can think of (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Eventful, LinkedIn, BlackPlanet, Faithbase, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsianAve and DNC Partybuilder), and why not? Some people might say it's overkill, but these platforms can reach millions of voters faster than his own website ever could, and they are also easy to maintain and even easier to set-up.

2007 was THE year of Social-networking/Web 2.0 sites and tools, and his campaign managed to really take advantage of the trend. Just a great job, really.

My vote for worst site of a Presidential Hopeful? The site of Lanakila Washington, with Kucinich's royal mess as second worst, and Hillary's as third worst.

The Thousand Tomorrows Interview

Tom Klinkowstein and I were recently interviewed by Pantopicon about our "A day in the life of a networked designer’s smart things or a day in a designer’s networked smart things, 2030" project, where we tried to envision the role of a designer in the year 2030.

They asked some very interesting questions, which lead to a lively discussion about the future, technology, sustainability, smart things and design.

Here's one of the questions:

Nik at Pantopicon: When you mention ‘her desires are realized with the help of smart things’, I cannot help but remember the many discussions I used to have about the notion ’smart’. ‘Smart’ from an engineering stance (’I made a cool thing that can do a lot of cool, useful things’) is not necessarily ’smart’ from a socio-cultural, economic, ecological etc. point of view. e.g. taking away desires or fulfilling them instantly, making battery-driven toys, … All media, especially of the information and communication-related kind, they all have effects beyond their immediate context of ‘utility/usefulness’, patterns of life are changed, economies, politics, etc. There are positive but also negative impacts. For example, many people wonder about the robustness of our world, its resilience (one driver for more nature-inspired systems) as we become ever more dependent of technologies, others worry about societal change, social cohesion etc. How do you look at this? Did it influence your work? After all, as extensions of man, new technologies also mean new responsibilities.

Irene Pereyra: Depending on technologies is fine with me, providing it’s the right kind of technology, and it supports a sustainable lifestyle/cycle. It’s just a matter of re-thinking what technology means. A lot of designers today are moving in the right direction, asking the right questions. Green design for example is incredibly popular right now, and it feels like designers finally understand the responsibilities they have to society.

For me one of the most interesting ideas/developments is the idea that something can be made to be up-gradable, rather than discarded. If I look at my lifetime for example, the amount of gadgets (cell-phones, walk-man’s, disc-mans etc.) I have discarded is astronomical. Unfortunately, today’s economy relies heavily on this “buy-buy-buy, new-new-new” attitude, so the more interesting question to me is, if we actually do manage to move into a cradle-to-cradle society, where things are re-used, or upgraded, how will it be supported politically, and economically? We have the technology available, the idea is there, designers are working around the clock, but the powers that be haven’t figured out how to shape society’s needs and desires around a sustainable economy. Technology is miles ahead of politics right now, but then again, it usually is.

Tom Klinkowstein: I agree with Irene: technology, commerce and social constructs have all evolved at a breathtaking pace. Politics is still waiting for its Vinton Cerf.

Design and engineering inventions like smart things will not bring heaven on earth but we work in a profession of endless iteration and eventually will get rather close.

Read the full interview at Pantopicon's blog, A Thousand Tomorrows.

I like the New Rambo Poster ?!

Euhm... I'm confused...

I actually like the new Rambo film poster.
I still don't think I'll go see it though.
But it's a good poster.

It's a good poster?!

Persepolis (Go see it!)

Persepolis is an amazing animated film based on Marjane Satrapi's childhood in pre/post revolutionary Iran.

The books are amazing too and the movie really captures her story and illustration style beautifully... If the Oscars manage to get their shit together before the end of the writer's strike, don't be surprised to see this movie win some awards for animation.

Yeah it's in french, but I can't stress this enough... Go see it, go see it, go see it!

The Pratt Preview of "A Day in the Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things or A Day in a Designer's Networked Smart Things, 2030"

Tom Klinkowstein and I have been working on this project for about 6 months now, and last Friday was the preview mini-opening of the project at Pratt. Which means, well... it's finished! The project was made for the Singapore International Design Festival and is about an imagined designer's day in the year 2030.

The diagram goes through her day and explains how she gets things done with the help of all her smart things.



We began with 4 presentations, Tom Klinkowstein spoke about "Experience Design", Leo Bonanni from the M.I.T Media Lab spoke about "Living Objects", Anthony Townsend from the Institute for the Future spoke about "Living Environments" and I spoke about "Blogs".

It was really a fascinating night about what the possibilities could be in the future of design.

Design it to Last

What kind of car do you drive? How long have you had it? 2 years, 5 years, 10 years? When you bought it did you need it, did you want it, did you love it?

How about now, do you still love it? Or are you contemplating buying a newer model, with more bells and whistles, the new streamlined design, and that nifty looking updated dash with the neat iPod hook-up?

And how many tape-decks, cd players, iPods, computers, and cell-phones have you owned in your lifetime? 10, 15, 100? Have you bought a new gadget this past year? I have, so you will have too probably.

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault. Products are specifically designed to be replaceable. Even if we wanted to update our electronics, we’re not allowed. We’re meant to throw it away and fall in love with the latest version. It’s what keeps our current economy going. It’s also what’s polluting our environment, but we don’t care. We ship our waste to China anyway. Let them deal with it. Out of sight, out of mind.

Yes we all run after the latest fad and we all want new things. So let’s just accept it, and not rock the boat. It’s human nature after all.

Or is it? Well, not everyone seems to be running after the latest fad. Porsche owners certainly aren't, they are so in love with their cars they couldn’t even imagine getting rid of it.

I’ll give you a nice stat: 60% of all Porsches ever made are still on the road…
(Sixty Percent!!!!)

That probably makes Porsche the most sustainable car in the world. However, when most people think of sustainable design, the last thing that comes to mind are gadgets, cars and electronics. Sustainable design tends to conger up images of granola, woolen socks and whiny neo-hippies. But that’s not what sustainability is about at all. It’s really about designing something to last, or to be updatable, or to be re-used. To use a catchy-term, it’s about “cradle-to-cradle” design (great book btw).

I used to work in a place where they had transformed their colorful iMac to a very cool-looking aquarium, and a friend of mine has come up with awesome packaging that can be re-used in everyday life.

Anything really that is well designed, loved, timeless, and classic will not be discarded that quickly. It’s as simple as that.

And that might be the reason why 60% of all Porsches ever made are still on the road, and also why people have no problems throwing out their old ugly grey printers.

It's Alive! (Experience Design)

For months now, Tom Klinkowstein and I have been working on our "A Day In The Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things" project, which will be shown at the Singapore International Design Festival in December. Before that, we're going to have an opening at Pratt... So if you're going to be in New York on the 16th, feel free to stop by for the opening of our project, at Pratt's Graduate Campus on 14th street (it's from 6pm-8pm). The event is free and so is the wine ;-)

The project is about "smart things" or "blogjects" or "spimes" and how a designer will interact with these in the year 2030.

Besides displaying the large print, Tom will have a short presentation on "Experience Design", I'll talk about "Blogs" and we have someone from the MIT Media Lab talk about "Living Objects" and someone from the Institute of the Future talk about "Living Environments".

Should be interesting!

Sufjan Stevens and the BQE

Went to see Sufjan Stevens' BQE suite at the BAM, and I was truly floored. The first hour of the show was an homage to New York's worst roadway, the BQE (the highway that connects Brooklyn to Queens), and the second half of the show was a rundown of his greatest hits which included "John Wayne Gacy, jr.", "Seven Swans", and of course "Chicago".

He'd been commissioned by the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) to create this very ambitious musical/film piece, and it was basically a live soundtrack to some film he had shot on and around the BQE.

The three-screen film projection was pretty clever in a minimalist Philip Glass sort of way and the orchestra (which probably counted 30 people total) played along to the visuals seamlessly (as you would expect from Sufjan). The seriousness of the piece and music was off-set by this goofy gang of hoola-hoopers, which, according to the booklet that was handed out before the show, had to do with the fact that the wheel is a man-made object, and so according to Sufjan the hoola-hoop and the automobile are forever linked in the same laws of physics.

For the whole duration of the show I felt like I was in another world, some strange world that only exists on stage and only Sufjan Stevens could imagine. There were times where I was laughing out loud (he did some pretty funny "banter" in between the songs), pinching Geoff in amazement (when the hoola-hoopers first came out) and so touched I got goose-bumps and almost choked up (I still get the same strong emotional reaction from "John Wayne Gacy, jr.").

Not a bad way to spend a Friday night.

Vanity and Wikipedia

Holland is one of a handful of nations in Europe that still has a monarchy. Much like in the UK their private-lives, love-lives and antics are always front page news in the Dutch tabloids. Some people spend much of their day gossiping about their outfits, hairdos, the Queen's latest outrageous hats or the princes' wives/girlfriends... Pretty mundane and uninteresting things, and I've never been quite up to date on all the latest of it.

Until recently that is...

About 2 months ago the news broke that one of the prince's wife's Wikipedia article had been altered regarding the entry about her alleged affair with famous drug-lord Klaas Bruinsma before she married the prince. This had been in the Dutch media for a couple of years now, and she had always stated that though she knew Bruinsma, she never had an affair with him. A little while ago however the drug-lords old body-guard came forward to say that she had in fact been Bruinsma's girlfriend for a while in the late 80's.

Ok well who cares...

Well, not a lot of people did, that is, until it was discovered that her Wikipedia entry was actually altered from the Queen's own computer at the Royal Palace. The entry was changed from "she had given incomplete and false information about the duration and extent of her contacts with drug kingpin Klaas Bruinsma" to "she had given incomplete information about the duration and extent of her contacts with drug kingpin Klaas Bruinsma".

Leaving out the word "false".

The change was noticed when the WikiScanner was looking to verify the latest additions and alterations to its articles and actually managed to trace the IP address back to the Queen's computer at the Royal Palace.

So these two Royal idiots were attempting to change history on the computer of his mother , who happens to be the Queen of Holland, and actually got caught. How embarrassing, and stupid. The Dutch media and comedians had a field day with this of course.

I would imagine it's very tempting though, to alter your own Wikipedia entry for one reason or another, and in fact it has proven to be. Since the WikiScanner went online a couple of months ago, it has been used to uncover thousands of vanity revisions.

So... What would you like to scrub clean from your past?

Designing with Passion (for Jesus?)

As I was thumbing through css vault, (a depository for great looking sites that have xhtml/css compliant code) I noticed how a lot of the newly added sites were religious in nature, or even the sites of actual churches.

It's a new development I've noticed recently and at first glance I was a bit confused by it. I'm personally not religious at all, so css vault was really my first encounter with these sites.

After looking at the latest additions a little closer I came to the conclusion that there could only be 2 possible explanations for the recent rise in well-designed religiously-themed sites:

1) CSS vault is going religious.
2) Religious/Church sites are well designed.

If I assume css vault's only God is compliant code and good design, then the second reason must be true.

But why is this?

Do these sites have a lot of money? Probably. Do they need to attract/convert people? Of course. Are they looking for more "cult-like" followers? Sure. But isn't that true for most big "brands"?
I think so... and yet most big brands don't nearly have such neat looking sites.

So something else is happening here. Maybe it's that the designers who create these sites believe in the message a lot more than some web-agency in New York believes in let's say, Coca-Cola. I know from my personal experience that when I'm excited about a project, or message, I tend to put a lot more work and effort into it. Everybody knows that having a room full of designers who truly believe in the brand's message is a recipe for a winning design.

So... I did a little research on the web and found these guys, who are a religious bunch of designers, with pretty impressive resumes. Designers are people too after all, and some people happen to be religious... And I imagine that in any large church there must be at least one, maybe even more talented designers, who'd be happy to do some pro-bono work for something they believe in.

Anyways, see for yourself:
Revolution / Soul Purpose / Bethlehem Church / Generation Church / The City Church / Church Media

Pretty nice looking sites eh? I especially like the "Pastors Corner Blog"... They're so ahead of the curve, they've even gone web 2.0 now! Incredible...

Exploring Iceland

Geoff posted some of the pictures he took of our recent Iceland trip to his website, and I think they captured the mood of the country quite nicely...

Anyways, check them out here.

Death of a Logo

Have been working on a site re-design for at&t, and I was once again reminded of the fact that they changed their awesome, strong, iconic Saul Bass logo (popularly known as the deathstar) to this poorly designed 3D-looking (and not even in the right perspective!) photoshoppy version of the old logo, made by some genius or guru or brand specialist or whatever at Interbrand for a whole lot of money (you can read the reasoning behind the changes here).

Saul Bass is turning in his grave.

Anyways, normally I'm not that annoyed with these things (hey, at least it's not the Verizon logo, now THAT'S a monstrosity! Why can't someone redesign that?), but now that I actually have to work with the new logo, and have turned from passive observer to active user, I realize what an enormous pain in the neck it is to work with. The thing just looks awkward next to anything, on any background, in any size.

The Saul Bass version actually had multiple versions of the globe. The size, color and placement determined the version used, which gave every application of it the strongest possible graphic impact.

Anyways... When this switch happened about 2 years ago during the AT&T/Cingular/SBC merger, I was agast that they would even consider changing a logo which had a 98% recognition rate, (most companies would die for such a high recognition rate) and I was honestly expecting at&t to fail miserably because of it.

And so I waited.

But nothing happened... There was no public uproar, no riots, no protests, no retrieval demands, and so yet another classic logo went away quietly, just like Paul Rand's classic UPS logo had a couple of years earlier.

And AT&T? (...ahum, excuse me at&t, it's lowercase now...) Well, they're doing fine, dandy, never better actually, thanks for asking!

So what does this all mean... Does this mean that these days the logo really doesn't matter that much after all? Well... I think that's exactly what that means. So if you are still in the business of designing logos, or still paying a lot for a logo, you might want to take this story into consideration, and question where your time and money is going.

If Saul Bass' perfectly designed logo is replaceable and can't make a lasting impact on society, what makes you think yours can?

Fun Home

I've been obsessively reading and enjoying Alison Bechdel's latest book/graphic novel/memoir "Fun Home" these past couple of days and have really been captivated by the beautifully honest and funny story, the amazingly bleak and detailed illustrative style, and the incredibly relevant references to literature of books and plays I've enjoyed and read in the past (Camus, Miller, Wilde).

Hungry to find out more about the illustrations, I found this excerpt on Wikipedia which explains her incredibly pain-staking creative process:

"Bechdel wrote and illustrated Fun Home over the course of seven years. Her laborious artistic process made the task of illustration slow. She began each page by creating a framework in Adobe Illustrator, on which she placed the text and drew rough figures. She used extensive photo reference and, for many panels, posed for each human figure herself, using a digital camera to record her poses.

Bechdel also used photo reference for background elements. For example, to illustrate a panel depicting fireworks seen from a Greenwich Village rooftop on July 4, 1976, she used Google Images to find a photograph of the New York skyline taken from that particular building in that period. She also painstakingly copied by hand many family photographs, letters, local maps and excerpts from her own childhood journal, incorporating these images into her narrative.

After using the reference material to draw a tight framework for the page, Bechdel copied the line art illustration onto plate finish Bristol board for the final inked page, which she then scanned into her computer.

The gray-green ink wash for each page was drawn on a separate page of watercolor paper, and combined with the inked image using Photoshop. Bechdel chose the greenish wash color for its flexibility, and because it had "a bleak, elegiac quality" which suited the subject matter.Bechdel attributes this detailed creative process to her "barely controlled obsessive-compulsive disorder"."

After reading that, I appreciated it even more. It's been out for about a year now, so it's really nothing new, but if you ever come across it in a bookstore or library, pick it up and see if you get dragged into the Bechdel's family drama as much as I did...

DieSpace

After an amazing trip to Iceland this summer, we hopped over to Amsterdam for some time with my friends and family, spending our days biking around, drinking Grolsch, eating, going out and having coffee. This is what I do about once a year to decompress, and it's the only time I truly get to relax and not have to worry about a thing.

...don't mean to bore you but hence the silence :-)

After Geoff had gone back to New York a friend of mine dragged me to a play (I have to admit I'm not the greatest fan of theatre), and to my surprise, I had a great time, and I honestly can't remember the last time I enjoyed live theatre that much.

The play was called "DieSpace" and it was about a virtual community, much like MySpace, but for the dead. The idea was to "capture" as much of someone's personality, likes and dislikes as possible, so that once the person was dead, their friends and family members would still have a community where they and the dead person would belong to.

Remember all those 80's movies? Where the rich uncle/father/grandfather dies and makes a video-tape telling everyone what they did and did not inherit? Kind of like that, but updated for the year 2007 and a whole lot more in depth.

Their reasoning behind the need for this type of a community is actually pretty true, the (as they called it) "greyification" of society (or in reality, what will happen when all the baby-boomers will retire). They figured there needs to be a community for those people as well, and not just for the last phase of their lives, but also for any desired time after that (for a small fee of course). According to them it's a huge hole in the market.

I thought the idea was awesome, funny and outrageous, mostly because of the concept, but also because of the on the fly high-tech, laptop audience participation and live music.

It's interesting to see that this type of Web 2.0 stuff, which is a fairly new technology, has actually made such a huge impact on society that there seems to be a need and desire to parody it, and not from within the medium itself, but from the most unlikeliest of sources, the old and traditional medium of live theatre.

So... What do you want to be when you're dead?

The 'Ole Way vs. Web 2.0

How have some things changed in our profession since 2000? Since the dot-com era, since the bubble burst, in this new age of web 2.0?

How we use the web and its services is completely different now. We have blogs, communities, and completely new and dynamic ways to create websites, but not everybody is caught up yet.

Are you up to speed or still living in the year 2000?

Of all the things listed to the right, the one thing I haven’t been able to get into is Facebook. To me I just don’t really see the point. I had a MySpace profile years ago but committed MySpace-Suicide a couple of months later after being highly frustrated of all the “How are You?” nonsense messages my friends were leaving all the time.

Don’t really care what your favorite color is, or what annoying song you might have instantaneously play when I get to your page. I also don’t care about your band or the fact that having 8,000 friends somehow makes you feel more popular.

You want to write to me? If you know me just send me an email, the whole world doesn’t need to know about our correspondence.

Facebook however did seem more promising to me there for a second. Once they opened up their platform to non-students (you needed a .edu email address to sign up before) it was really amazing how many professionals (read adults) started to use it as a networking tool. Almost everyone I know now has a Facebook profile.

But here’s the annoying thing about Facebook, without being a member you can’t even look at someone’s profile. When people email me to tell me they just posted some interesting information or graphic on their Facebook page, I can’t even get to it, unless I well… euhm… sign up with Facebook.

No Facebook! I don’t want to be a member, I don’t care how “highly” exclusive your little club is, I just want to be able to see someone’s profile who actually is a member.

So forget it Facebook! Stop trying! You’re not cornering me into signing up! You’re not! Aaaahh!

Do it Yourself!

For a while now I've been really entertained by the Manhattan Mini Storage ads in the NY subway. Entertained in the old school traditional advertising sort of way. At first glance there's nothing ground-breaking about them, and the design of them is actually pretty horrible, but they're just these great conceptual funny ads I always look forward to seeing every time I get into the subway.

The latest addition to the set is a poster where they encourage you to go to their website and vote on the ads (or let them know if you prefer ads with hard cold facts), and you can even upload your own versions of the ad if you think you can do it better. If they like them, they'll put them up.


Now that's pretty groundbreaking.

Why? Well, because usually all Art Direction, Copy Writing and Design is done by some expensive ad agency on Madison Avenue for a whole lot of money. But a lot of companies and people are now giving the consumer the power to be part of their brand's experience, first hand.

Music artists have been doing this for a while now, Beck let his fans create his latest album cover and Modest Mouse encouraged film makers to create entries for their music video. In a way, what Converse, Nike and Reebok are doing with letting people design their own shoes is also part of this overall movement.

So do we have total control? No. When you look closer there is still some control from the creative department of the artist or brand. Modest Mouse supplied video footage of the band in front of a green screen, and Converse, Nike and Reebok have set the basic template for you to only really determine materials and colors.

So what you're getting is the basic building blocks for you to do whatever you wish with. Facilitating non-designers to design is the name of the game these days.

It's Legos for adults basically.

Smarter Design Choices for the Environment

Okay so sustainability is totally hip right now. Everyone cares about the environment. Green is the new black. Al Gore's film was the most watched documentary ever. Yes, yes, yes and yes, but what can designers do to help the environment?

Not many designers know how to properly design with the environment in mind, and us designers are some of the world's greatest polluters. Packaging, printing, recycling, paper-making, inks, foil stamping, binding... All this and more is what we are putting out there in terms of energy (ab)use. According to the Environment Protection Agency, as much as a third of the developing world's non-industrial solid waste streams consists of packaging.

There are some myths out there that the energy needed to recycle minimizes any savings in the use of recycled papers versus virgin paper (paper directly from trees), but by using recycled papers there is less energy consumption, fewer greenhouse gases, less waste paper and less solid waste.

So designers. What can we do? Turns out we can do a lot. Here are some ideas.

Plan ahead

• Consider 100% PCW uncoated paper, or elemental chlorine free or totally chlorine free paper.
• For long shelf life, choose a paper that meets the American National Standards Institute standards for product longevity.
• Plan ahead to avoid air shipping, and use targeted, updated mailing lists.
• If designing packaging, design it to last, can it be used for something else?
• Design packaging closest to the product's size, and at a most efficient size for shipping. As much as 50% of packaging waste is from the outer packaging that the consumer will never see.
  

Production

• Use the fewest materials necessary to be effective.
• Consider standard paper sizes to maximize positioning and bleeds (4up? 6up?).
• Design with multipurpose use in mind (can an invitation also be self-mailer?).
• If the printed piece isn't reusable, ensure that it is recyclable.
• Use digital photography when possible.
• Use PDF digital proofs instead of paper printouts.

Inks & Finishing

• Consider vegetable-based inks.
• Use fewer ink colors, consider 2 color jobs over 4 color jobs (less inks are also cheaper for the client, and can have amazing graphic impact).
• Consider less ink coverage.
• Avoid metallic and fluorescent inks when possible.
• Consider using aqueous varnishes and coatings instead of UV coatings and laminates.
• Consider alternatives to foil stamping.
• Consider water-based glues.

Printing

• Choose an FSC-certified printer.
• Consider filmless and plateless digital printing for small runs over off-set printing.
• Send artwork to printer electronically.

Then lastly there is that old myth that recycled papers always look, well, recycled, and that 2 color jobs miss out on the graphic impact. I couldn't disagree more. Here's a self-mailer I designed that was printed on recycled paper and made by only using 2 inks (purple and black).

Can you tell it was designed with the environment in mind?



(for more ideas on eco-friendly print download monadnock paper mills' pdf)

The Traveling Transumer

I recently read a marketing article on trendwatching where they defined transumers (experience driven consumers) as the following:

"TRANSUMERS are consumers driven by experiences instead of the ‘fixed’, by entertainment, by discovery, by fighting boredom, who increasingly live a transient lifestyle, freeing themselves from the hassles of permanent ownership and possessions. The fixed is replaced by an obsession with the here and now, an ever-shorter satisfaction span, and a lust to collect as many experiences and stories as possible. Hey, the past is, well, over, and the future is uncertain, so all that remains is the present, living for the 'now'."

Though I hate these catchy marketing terms (Transumer makes me think of Optimus Prime),
I would say that by that definition I am definitely a transumer.

While underway to Portland, OR it struck me once again what a horrible experience being at an airport can be. A little while ago a friend of mine sent me one of those cutesy questionnaires
(the famous Marcel Proust one) where they ask you pretty mundane questions meant to kill the boredom in the days before radio or TV, and one of the questions was "what I hate most".

I wrote down "being at the airport".

When you travel within the US and you have a lay-over at a small airport, and you are lucky enough to get a table at one of those horrible chain restaurants like Chili's or something, you usually still have too much time to kill afterwards so you then end up browsing uninteresting magazines while buying overpriced skittles, or if that's not your thing your only other option is to wait in those uncomfortable chairs by the gate and pay more than you would pay anywhere else to connect your laptop to their wireless network. And what is up with the lighting at those places? Instant headache.

Anyways. Those are pretty crappy options I'd say.

Some airports are like jails where your entire experience is mapped out, and your choices are extremely limited. If in our experience economy, the temporary, the transient, is what's being valued, the next logical step is to fix that.

It's not all bad though. Some airports have been very pro-active in changing their environments for a more positive tailor made experience.

Retail stores realized the importance of a properly designed environment a long time ago (think Nike Town or the Apple Store) and the bigger European airports have finally taken their cues and some of them now have Spa's, Gyms and extensive shopping opportunities.

And yes, people do tend to spend more money then so it is also good for the bottom line.

Schiphol Airport (Holland), which I think is always a pleasure, has a new device called Fuel for Travel which allows you to download travel guides, music, audio books, tv shows etc. to your portable digital device for the same price you would pay at most online stores. They also have a new service called "say yes and go" where you can get married in between flights. A little bizarre, but whatever floats your boat I guess. Now if they can get some movie theaters and museums in there I'd be pretty satisfied.

The point is, we don't have to suffer through badly designed experiences. If with a little thought, effort and design airports can be made more enjoyable, imagine what the possibilities would be with the really terrible experiences like hospitals, banks and DMV's...

One last note:
We flew Delta (whose latest ad campaigned promised a whole lot of change - centered around you!), but in reality there was no change at all. Actually I think the experience of flying Delta was actually worse than what I remembered it to be.

Virtual Floor Planner

A couple of weeks ago I went to a friend’s housewarming party on the Upper East Side, and as we all got a tour of her tiny apartment she jokingly showed us how her new bed frame doesn’t allow her to close her bedroom door anymore. We stood there pretty amused as we tried to think of any other possible way for her to fit her IKEA bed-frame in her tiny bedroom.

She said she’d measured it three times before heading over to IKEA-hell and was convinced it would fit… well… until the whole thing was assembled, and it almost did fit, but almost is not quite good enough in New York City apartments. Turns out she hadn’t taken the radiator into consideration, and she was now contemplating installing a sliding door.

A little while later I ran across this new site called Floor Planner (another great addition to the “Do it Yourself” movement in design) which is an interactive floor planner that allows you to organize a plethora of furniture, textures and appliances in a virtual space (you add the measurements yourself) not unlike most interior decorator software.

It’s AutoCAD for the masses basically.


You can get one try for free (it’s pretty fun) and otherwise I think it’s very reasonably priced. How neat, next move I might be decorating my apartment in the virtual world.

A Multi-Sensory Experience

Obviously the web offers a great platform for telling a story, and in the past this was usually done in a very linear way. There was only one way to view information, and really no way to interact with any of the content.

“Interaction Design” in the past only referred to having the user move through the content on the entire site from an information architecture point of view, but didn’t allow any actual interactions or choices within the article or posting.

Now the options are endless. The way we tell stories on-line have become more non-linear, and now allow the user to view the content in any way they choose. Previously static stories (news articles etc.) are now able to offer alternate ways to engage with through streaming web-cam, animation, feedback, comments, sound, video etc.

You prefer reading your information? This is possible. Are you more of a visual thinker? Check out the video. Care to listen to the content while working? Stream the audio. Wonder what other people are thinking? Read the comments.

Web design is moving into a realm where we have to think of all the possible senses, all the possible preferences, all the differences of all the different users, and it’s slowly becoming the most tailor-made experience you can have with a product, brand or service.

This is exciting stuff…

With the up and coming of blogs as a legitimate source for information, Web 2.0, social network sites, and the prevalence of broadband, what “interaction design” means is changing. Web designers are now designing less in the traditional sense (sure we’re still interested in type, color and layout, but it doesn’t end there anymore), and we are now focusing more on designing highly personalized experiences.

Today’s web designers are looking at the whole thing more holistically. Before any design even starts we are now interested in telling a compelling story, and creating a memorable experience. The whole focus has become much more user-centered.

We listen first, and design later…

When you enable your users to choose their own path through your content, and allow them to have a highly interactive and personalized experience you can make them feel less like a faceless user and more like a human being, which sometimes we forget that the users accessing our sites, are well… euhm, actual people.

Good human-centered design is now not only simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction and accessibility, it's also about creating a platform for a highly personalized experience. Allowing the user control of your content is a great way to create affinity and foster positive attitudes towards your brand, company, product or service.

The Wonderful Marriage of XHTML and CSS

This past month I was asked twice by clients why they should adopt Web Standards for their new sites. Well, here’s what I told them…

Web Standards deals with making your site accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities. It also makes it easier for search engines to find your site and to degrade gracefully to a PDA. But most importantly, it separates your formatting (CSS) from your structure (XHTML).

Why use XHTML? Because it’s the mark-up language that married HTML and XML, and is the latest mark-up language that is set as standard by the W3C (They are like the web-police trying to create standards for the web). The reason XHTML degrades better to a PDA, is because it allows you to organize your structure in the way of what the "actual" information hierarchy is (what text comes first, second, what are the headlines, etc.) that way even when all the style-sheets and images fall away you can still read the information as it was meant to be read on the current PDA's.

Why use CSS? Because it’s ALL the styling information for your website (colors, typography, layout, imagery etc.). The advantage of keeping your style-sheet separate from you structure is, if you change one instance in the CSS (let's say you want all body type throughout the entire site to be red now), you can do so by changing it in the CSS document alone, where in the past, you would have to change that in every single page.

Bottom line? Less time spent making updates = Less money you have to spend.

Personally, I am not a big fan of many Flash sites, very often it’s overused and the motion gets to be annoying after a while quite frankly. Doesn’t mean there’s no place for Flash, if you have a highly interactive site like Color in Motion, it can be absolutely amazing. If you are not asking your user for any interaction however, it just takes too long to load, has bad looking typography, is hard to update, is hard to find by search engines, and not to mention impossible to degrade to a PDA.

Here are some other arguments for using web standards (via Aarron Walter):

• By keeping your formatting (CSS) separated from structure (XHTML), you will use less code, which makes your site download faster. Your external CSS files will also cache in the browser’s temporary memory so the code doesn’t have to download each time a page is viewed.


• Maintenance times are less by building sites without nested tables, which can be a nightmare to try to modify. Changes can be made site-wide in a design by modifying one external style sheet, saving time and money.


• Following Web Standards improves proper cross-browser display, and helps ensure that a site is forward compatible with future browsers


• Any contract work with the US government, needs to be Section 508

Sounds simple? It is, but you'd be surprised how many sites get this wrong.

The New geoffreyparacka.com

Just finished up designing Geoff's new site, and it turned out pretty nice. We had some issues trying to get his films in a semi-decent format/size for the web but after reading a couple of on-line forums we managed to figure it out. We compressed them from Final Cut Pro to 15fps, made them half size, and saved them as .mp4

The quality is obviously not as good as when you see them in 16mm, but it's pretty much as good as it gets for the web.

Anyways, take a wander...

The Future of Experience Design

Tom Klinkowstein and I have been working on a very interesting project about a day in the life of a designer in the year 2030. We have been writing the content and we're basically trying to imagine what the role of a designer will be after the Experience Design/Web 2.0/Second Life Revolution has happened. Some of it is very far-fetched and sci-fi-ish, and some of it is very plausible.

I'll be posting some of the content once it's developed, but for now, enjoy this video I found through one of my favorite blogs, Logic+Emotion. It's amazing how some of our thoughts on the future correspond with this video...

Design = The Bottom Line

Three weeks ago I went to the IDEO discussion panel at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum where they discussed the importance of design to business. The panel was lead by Bruce Nussbaum (who is the assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek, and whose blog I happen to be quite addicted to) and included Tim Brown (chief executive officer of IDEO), Claudia Kotchka, (VP, design innovation and strategy at P&G), and Gael Towey, (chief creative officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia).

It was right up my alley and very interesting, exactly what I have been talking about on my blog. It was also extremely exciting to see some of the world’s most innovative leaders talk about design and its importance to business.

Nussbaum spoke about how some CEO’s still have a problem with the word “Design”, because they think it has something to do with wallpaper and maybe the suits they wear. They are much more comfortable calling it “Innovation”… Innovation sounds strong and masculine. It implies leadership. Nussbaum doesn’t care what it’s called and thinks it should all be called banana.

Claudia Kotcka, (who was appointed by Lafley in 2001 to inject some design thinking to P&G) spoke of a wonderful interval at P&G where she managed to show a bunch of P&G accountants the value of design by comparing a standard measuring cup to the oxo measuring-cup. The accountant’s initial response was “isn’t design usually the first thing to get cut from the budget?” but after her simple demo, (the oxo measuring-cup allows you to read the measurements on the inside of the cup, so you don’t have to raise it to your eyelevel) they approved her new budget for more design.

I posed a question to the panel as to why they think so few designers today are interested in this “Design Thinking”, “Empathy Economy”, “Right Brain meets Left Brain” revolution, and Tim Brown’s response was, that while the business world is slowly starting to accept design as a necessity, as a means for innovation, not many designers and design institutions understand the importance of design and design thinking to businesses just yet. Designers are not used to allowing people from other disciplines to be creative and a lot of them still think they are the ones who “own” design and creativity.

According to him what the word “design” means is changing, and unless designers catch-up to this new trend in business, the term “design” is in danger of getting fully hijacked by non-designers.

The most innovative companies today are all non-design firms, (with the exception of IDEO maybe) and there are already MBA programs out there experimenting with adding design to their curriculum, but very few (almost none) design schools are yet experimenting with adding business-like sensibilities to their skill-sets.

So are designers in danger of being left behind in innovation by MBA-ers?

Pitfalls of Multiple Touch-Points

In an older entry in this blog (The Difference between Experience Design and Usability), I wrote about how usability is different from experience design because usability is only one touch-point and experience design is the sum of all the possible touch-points in which the consumer interacts with a company (product, web, interface, customer service, retail store, peripheral devices etc.)

From the company’s point of view, if they design all aspects of the product or service, they are in control of your overall experience. From the consumer’s point of view however, in order to actually have a good experience, you would need all the touch-points to align, and be positive, because when one fails, the whole thing falls apart.

With a device like the iPod, in order to use it, you also need to have iTunes. Apple was able to not only control the design of the actual product, but also invent a way to better organize music on an mp3 player. Apple made the experience of organizing music better, and they also made 2 customers out of where there was only 1 before.

Recently I read a great article by Adam Greenfield, and he gives some great examples of how some good ideas (acela, nike+, trainaway) fail because the integration of all these touch-points has either not been designed properly, relies to heavily on branding, or is completely neglected.

I’m interested in the branding part.

With cross-brands like nike+ (nike and apple), the experience is constrained mostly by branding. It only works with certain nike shoes, and only with the iPod nano (which kind of makes sense since you don’t want to go running with an iPod with movable parts). It would have been great however, if the technology could have been made available for any shoes or mp3 players, but obviously the heavily branded experience of nike+ only works with, well… euhm, Nike.

The argument would be then, to either have an independent company create a similar device that is highly customizable, or better yet have Nike and Apple open up the platform so it works for all shoes and mp3 players. This is obviously not what they were hoping for, since they want their company, and their company alone, to be in control of your experience, and basically sell as much as they possibly can to 1 consumer.

So… The multi-touchpoint experience now actually becomes a hindrance to the consumer, and it feels a bit like being locked into a brand monopoly (we now have to buy the shoes they tell us to, the right mp3 player, iTunes etc.), so even though they are selling it to us as if we are getting more control, in reality they are taking away any choices we could possibly make for ourselves.

The solution would be then, I think, to allow the consumers to make as many choices as they want themselves, and design the product in a sort of modular fashion where you allow the consumer to have a highly customizable experience. Then if you still want people to buy your sneakers, well… go back to the drawing board and make them better so people will want to buy your sneakers because they are good, not because you force them to.

How Ethnography Can Help Design

Most designers tend to be quite detached from the end-user when creating visual solutions. We’re not always too concerned with what the actual meaning or practicalities of our designs are, and our strengths lie more in our visual thinking than in our holistic or empathetic abilities.

At school we’re trained to design, which just means we have to visually engage the viewer, and so according to most designers our responsibilities end there. When we start work we create solutions within a certain framework that’s been set by others who’ve supposedly done the research for us, though in reality very few places actually do research, or collect any kind of feedback after the fact.

No wonder there are so many horrible products and services out there no one wants, nobody bothered to find out if anybody actually really wanted them.

Most designers also don’t think of people as people. We prefer to call them “consumers”, “customers” or “users”. It’s not our fault, we never get to see or hear any of them. Within the confines of our studios we like to think we are in control, and think we have some sort of authority in knowing what it is people want, even though very few of us actually get to hear any customer feedback after we have sent off our work to the next wheel of the production cycle.

The truth is, in order to have a really successful design, product, or service, designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences, and make an effort to truly understand what it is they need, and where it is they are coming from.

Ethnography does exactly that. Ethnography is all about answering questions that are generally out of a designer’s reach. It’s about observing people in their natural environments, and finding ways to improve their experiences from the bottom-up. It’s not about selling products or services at this point, it’s about finding out what it is people need or want before any design even starts. Doesn’t that sound like a logical first step?

Rather than guestimating what it is people supposedly crave, they go out and methodologically study people’s behaviors and experiences in everyday life, and try to make sense out of all the complex problems and questions new products and services might raise. This approach generates more actual solutions than any thinking or brainstorming inside the studio between designers ever could.

So how come every design studio still doesn’t have ethnographers on staff?
Or better yet, how come so few designers are interested in holistic solutions?

Finding Art and Beauty in the Unusual

Last weekend I watched 2 very interesting documentaries. Interesting because they both, in their own way, used the documentary platform differently than most documentaries I have ever seen, and because they managed to find art and beauty in the most unlikely places. No cheesy voice-overs, and there was very little emphasis on the human aspect of story-telling –instead, the narrative was mostly done visually.

“Manufactured Landscapes” follows photographer Edward Burtynsky as he sets off to industrialized places such as China and Bangladesh to photograph the new man-made landscapes in a breathtakingly beautiful way. I’ve always loved his photography and the documentary does a great job to tell the story behind these incredible photographs.

The opening scene feels like something from a Kubrick film… It’s an endlessly long dolly-shot inside a factory in China, showing the enormity of the plant, as well as the visual landscape these people create while they're working tirelessly at tediously repetitive jobs.

Then, you see all the workers lined-up outside, all in perfect rows, in their brightly colored yellow outfits, as if they are about to march off to fight some distant war, but really they’re just getting chastised by their superiors for not producing enough.

Though his photographs are beautiful, I felt there was an inherent sadness about them. The documentary tells the story of industrialization in Asia through his photographs, and how we are rapidly moving to a non-sustainable world, with piles and piles of garbage of Yesterdays gadgets. It shows how mankind has managed to change its environment with total disregard as to whether or not it actually should.

On a completely different note, “Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait” is, as the title would imply, about legendary French soccer-player Zinedine Zidane. The film manages to not only show the genius of one of the world’s greatest soccer-players, but it also elevates soccer to high-art. The footage is shot by 17 35mm cameras, and films Zidane while playing a match with his old club Real Madrid.

The opening title sequence is amazing, they film a television up-close, so close that all you can see are the RGB light-colors flickering as the white shape of Zidane’s uniform passes by.



Then you’re transported inside the stadium, filmed so crisp and beautifully, it almost feels hypnotic, surreal, hyper-real, like a video-game maybe. The cameras, instead of following the ball, which is what we’re used to with soccer, just follow Zidane as he’s running up and down the field, so you don’t really know what’s going on in the game itself, but its meditative pace suggests that the real story is in the man himself.

Unlike with most documentaries, there's really no narration. It's an extremely up-close, yet detached view of an athlete at the top of his profession. The extreme close-ups of his face, sweat and heavy breathing make it feel as if it is some sort of otherworldly nature-documentary.

I have to say the sound design is incredible. Sometimes you hear the cheering fans in the bleachers and the overwhelming sound of a stadium, and sometimes you just hear Zidane’s heavy breathing, the dull-sound of his shoes hitting the ball, and the light sound of his heels touching the grass. Mogwai supplied the soundtrack for it, and their hypnotic music is as essential to the film as the footage is.

RSS in Plain English

Some people still have a hard time understanding just what exactly RSS is, what the benefits could possibly be, or how to use it.

The beauty of RSS is, that where before, without RSS, you had to go looking for updates from your favorite blogs or websites, and sometimes they were updated, sometimes they weren't. Now you know immediately when there is new information, because your feedreader will display it immediately.

So... it basically keeps you more informed on your favorite sites, which makes it a great tool for people who use the web... well... all the time... For me, it's pretty much the way of life now... Let the information come to me!

Anyways, if you are one of those people who still doesn't quite "get" RSS, you should really click on the above image and watch the video... or, you can read the following article: www.whatisrss.com

Web Changes Et Al...

Spent the past couple of weeks redesigning irenepereyra.com as well as this blog, and well... I think it's finished, but one is never quite sure with websites...

I tried to get the new irenepereyra.com to be more 2007-esque and less 2003-ish, and incorporate some of my new favorite buzz-words like "designing experiences" etc. It's now based on a three column grid which turned out quite nice I think. The biggest difference however between the old irenepereyra.com and the new one, besides the obvious visual difference, is the way it's written, which is much more like this blog, a bit more personal and accessible.

Since I spent every free moment of my days designing the new site, have been slacking on the 'ole blog, but not to worry, next Friday I'm going to an IDEO discussion panel with Bruce Nussbaum and Tim Brown, which I'm sure will be interesting... Keep you posted.

My Fictitious Friend Nancy

“I can’t believe it’s not butter!” Really? Hmmm… As Anthony Bourdain would say: I can.

This is the problem with so much advertising today, making statements that insult our intelligence and that make absolutely no sense. Of course margarine doesn’t taste anything like real butter, and to suggest to us that it does, well, it’s just a bit condescending isn’t it?

Oh, so you say it tastes just like butter, well then it must!

Let’s review even further, the “I” in “I can’t believe it’s not butter”, is just who exactly? Are they trying to say it’s the consumer, or does it refer to some strange copy-writer who apparently never tasted real butter before? Maybe they had a focus-group of 20 people complete a survey that asked:

Margarine is most like:
a) coffee
b) power-tools
c) deep-sea diving
d) butter

Perhaps they justified it by saying that people on diets like to think they are eating real butter, and they don’t want the product to be called by its actual name, as they want to keep the illusion of eating actual delicious fatty butter alive. Or, it could be that the small splinter-cell of dieters really are in such denial about their food, that like vegans they start calling tofu, not tofu but chicken or pork or something.

That’s not what this is about though.

For decades advertisers have relied on conveying their message to us, with a complete disregard of what the consumer’s actual needs were, or who their consumers even really are. Making up personas, compiling fictitious data, guestimating wishes. Hey it’s not an exact science is it? So why not skew the results a little bit in our favor.

In my first job in e-commerce I had to “write” fictitious personas, which were not based on any real demographic or ethnographic research, and these invented people were supposed to be the most common users for our website.

An example of that would be: “Nancy, is between 28-35, drives an economy car, has a dial-up connection she mostly uses for email, makes between $30k-$50k a year, has a small expendable income and wants to shop for cheaper airfare to meet her mother in Florida”.

This tells us absolutely nothing about the actual consumers, and even back then, when I was writing this nonsense I wasn’t quite sure what the benefit of all of this could possibly be.

So what should we do? Well, I’m a firm believer of direct observation, case studies and ethnography, IDEO style. Go into a store, subway, Starbucks, school or whatever, and really see how people interact with products or services, find out what the problems are, asses where there could be improvements and then try to make the overall experience better. Open up the dialogue with the consumers and don’t be afraid of criticism.

The days of inventing people and statements are over. We are now interested in finding out what the consumer really wants, not what we like to think they want.

What Happened To US?

Went to the MoMa last weekend and saw Dan Perjovschi’s “What Happened To US?” exhibit. He created this enormous installation by directly drawing on the wall of the MoMa, which at first glance just looks like some child-like scribbling, but when you observe it closer, and you take the entire thing in (it’s very very large at about 4 floors high) you realize it’s a very humorous, and at times serious critique of American society as it pertains to the war in Iraq, immigration, spend-drift capitalism and the environment.

I really enjoy illustration, even in its simplest form, but Ted needed some convincing. It was interesting to see that he didn’t really see the merit of the installation until he got “the message”, which in his defense is in fact the real value of the piece, and we agreed that it would probably not work as well if the piece was smaller, and if the artist had left out the text.

The “50 years of Helvetica” special exhibit was a little disappointing to be honest, maybe not for people who don’t know anything about typography, but I felt it was a little bland and didn’t really offer any new insights or anything. I was also imagining a more comprehensive history of Helvetica but it was just a tiny exhibit tucked away in a corner with a couple of posters and some metal type. I guess the majority of MoMa visitors aren't much into typography, or maybe the curator just missed the mark on this one.

They did show a 4-minute excerpt of Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica” Documentary, which is just incredible. The documentary does a very good and sometimes humorous job at showing that Helvetica is definitely the most ubiquitous of all typefaces and is seen and used absolutely everywhere.

How RFID's Can Replace Branding

For a conference I'm participating in about the Future of Design (Design in the year 2030), I've been doing a lot of reading about RFID's, Smart Things, Spimes and Blogjects. The terminology sounds a little intimidating, but all these things are basically autonomous entities that could track, sense, respond, blog, record and archive things based on human associative thinking.

For this conference we are encourage to really think “futuristic”, not necessarily “realistic”, but there are some definite realistic possibilities within this realm that could change the entire consumer culture, and put the consumer more in control, which is something I’m highly interested in.

RFID’s for example are already being used for kind of uninteresting tracking purposes on clothes and other articles, but they could potentially be used for a plethora of other things such as inventory, and the storing of any type of information about the product itself -which is where things have the potential of getting really interesting, not to mention change the entire production cycle, and in term design and marketing.

There's an interesting Dutch project called "Milk" that tracked the "history" of a batch of milk. It shows the "road" the milk has traveled to get to its final destination –the consumer’s plate. The milk was produced by Latvian farmers, made into cheese by a local factory with the help of an Italian expert, then transported to the Netherlands and stored in a Dutch cheese warehouse to ripen, after which it was sold at the Utrecht market and finally eaten by Dutch citizens.

Ideally you could store all sorts of information about a product, (not just where it has traveled) for the consumers to access at any time. Not sure how that would work exactly, you would need a scanner of some sort, or maybe a type of tracking number you could type into an application or website or something.

Some things we could then potentially know about an object or product:

• When and where it was made.
• The road it has traveled to get to its final destination.
• The functional principles.
• The help-desk efficiency.
• How it obeys to standards.
• How much energy it uses
• What the materials are/how it’s constructed.
• Who made it (illegal immigrants, child labor)
• It could tell you exactly how much energy was used to design, promote, manufacture, transport and sell it.
• It could show us what it looks like not just in the end state, but at every stage of development.
• It could inform you to make decisions based on legal, social, ethical, and environmental criteria.

Once these blogjects, spimes, or however you want to call them are in place, they have the potential to replace branding, because they would inform more completely than some nonsensical slogan could. Sales pitches would also go away because a product would come with any information you could possibly want to know about it.

This type of brutal honesty would obviously only work for companies who want to highlight these points about their product or service, like companies whose products are sustainable or not made by child labor (think American Apparel). Companies who are still in the myth-making business, however, would obviously not benefit from this and would still need a great advertising agency. I'm not suggesting advertising will disappear entirely, I'm merely suggesting that other worlds are possible as well.

Maybe this is my idea of nerdy-utopia, but I would definitely like to know these things about a product, and it would be a much more comprehensive way to chose between competitors than a consumer report ever could. I also imagine that if these things become common practice, companies would be forced to think more about things like sustainability, and labor practices.

Here’s an interesting article about current uses of RFID’s.

Bring the Love Back

A woman is breaking up with a pompous man...
He doesn’t listen to her...
He’s the one doing all the talking...
When she asks him, do you even know me?

He replies: Know you? Sweetheart, I know everything about you. You’re 28 to 34, your online interests include music, movies, and laser hair removal, you have a modest but dependable and disposable income…

It’s a great new ad by Bring the Love Back and the man in the commercial, is in fact the advertiser, and the woman the consumer.

We as a society are definitely trying to break up with the advertisers who don’t listen to us. We want it to be a dialogue, we want to be heard, we want to participate, all the things I have been talking about on my blog.

Anyways, check it out here, it’s great.

The New (Experience) Delta

Yesterday I saw Delta's much-anticipated new ad on Fox during the show House (prime-time) and it's following the experience revolution cues pretty exact (though probably subtle enough for the average viewer not to notice).

Delta is coming out of Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) and with their ad titled "Anthem (see ad here)" they are showing us how they have changed. The new ad starts with a bleak opening sequence with empty airports and baggage-claims but then it changes to a fast-paced up-beat "Delta Workshop" type of environment where they show us they are redoing everything from the seats to the food to the flight-attendants outfits.

Nothing too out of the ordinary here, but by using catchy phrases such as "Change Means Rethinking Every Moment of Your Travel Experience" you can probably understand why I took notice. I've been talking and writing about this experience revolution for a while now so for an ad to make this promise, well, they better deliver.

I did a little research and found out that "SS&K" (Shepardson Stern & Kaminsky) of New York won the Delta account, and that apparently they are known for doing a lot of work for political candidates. They were also recently hired by Barack Obama and are set to use some nontraditional media for persuasive purposes targeted at young voters.

So Delta is tackling their new campaign as if they are on a political campaign trail. They want to make the experience of flying better, and make changes based around the ever-changing needs of their consumers.

The new campaign promises a whole lot, and the question is whether or not Delta can actually deliver. If you check out their website http://change.delta.com/, they are speaking of a "Delta Community", and about "Sharing" your ideas... They want to make the travel experience better "Together". All very lofty ideas, but for it to be a true "Experience" centered change, they need to not only promise it, they need to make the changes actually happen. This only the future can tell.

Tim Mapes (vice president for marketing at Delta) said of the new campaign that they do not want to set up expectations that are false. I wonder how much of this new campaign has been a true multi-disciplinary collaborative effort, or if it's just a smart marketing move from the guys at SS&K.

Does Delta really know what changing the experience of flying means, or do they just want us to think they do?

Buying Buzz

Just received a ranting email from a friend of mine (who will remain nameless) who is involved in creating a fake blog for an insurance company which is set to hit the internet this summer. He's embarrassed, angry and pretty much ready to quit his job. The creative director seems to think that creating a fake blog is an excellent idea because (to quote him) "blogs are totally in right now!"

Euhm... yeah real blogs are maybe, but there's nothing sadder than a fake blog, especially when they get found out (like Coca-Cola's Zero Movement, or Wall-Mart did earlier this year), and trust me, sooner or later they will get found out.

Who's doing the research at that place? When is creating false consumer experiences ever a good idea? Besides, is anyone actually going to believe that some person in love with their insurance company is going to blog about it? I mean stranger things have happened I suppose but this just has bad idea written all over it. You can't buy buzz. You just can't.

It seems like a lot of companies have been running after this blog-fad. They don't seem to understand that actual blogging is not easy, and that to have a successful blog is nearly impossible.

Without trying to understand what it really means, what it is that motivates people to blog, companies are just putting the elements that they think make a blog happen together and expect people to be interested.

Hire a copy-writer, write a little story about why company X is so great, add some supporting comments and you're done right?

No, not exactly. Not at all actually.

Blogging takes a lot. You need to be passionate about something, and take time out of your already busy day to write down some thoughts, all while trying to keep the conversation somewhat consistent and interesting. It's about being honest about whatever it is that you're writing about it.

If we're writing about a brand, (which let's face it, not too many blogs are in the first place) it's basically the only way we have to create a dialogue between us and a company, or at least have our voices be heard.

I think that knowing, I mean really knowing, what people think about your brand can only be helpful, even if it's less than positive. If companies are now inventing an experience, inventing conversations, they are missing out on the exact thing that they can gain from blogs, which is free insight into their consumers' thoughts.

Armano's 4 C's of blogging (community, consistency, content and clarity) only work if it's written by the real author, otherwise nothing makes sense.

Who knows... This might've been written by some Coca-Cola ad-exec. So buy some Coke people cause I just looooove it!

Personally Impersonal

Just received a travel-update-email from a friend who's traveling through Asia. It was addressed to about 50+ people (with all the emails visible, which always annoys me) and told a 4 page travel account of his whereabouts. In the email was a link to his flickr account with all the pictures he had taken so far. I doubt that all the people addressed in his email would care about his travels, but it's just much easier to address these things to "all" rather than handpick the emails in your address book.

We're getting personal spam from people we sometimes barely know, and the way I see it is, unless you are having an art-exhibit, concert, party, or you're looking for an apartment, nobody really cares. Besides what's next, the mass-wedding invite?

It got me thinking about why we're putting ourselves out there in cyberspace in the first place. This "Update of my Life Email" is definitely something of my generation and I've received a lot of these over the past couple of years. The funny thing is that with MySpace and blogs etc. we seem to be very open about our personal life. We don't seem to care who reads it and are in return also shamelessly reading about other people's lives. I read David Byrne's blog whenever he updates it, and in a weird voyeuristic way I know what he's been doing even though I never met him.

You would think that we have gotten a lot more "personal" or "connected" to other people in general through blogs, but I think this technology is making quite the opposite happen. A Dutch version of Myspace.com (Hyves.net) received very angry emails over the fact that from one day to the other, without warning they made your visits to people's blogs visible to the writer of the blog. So apparently a sort of voyeurism is happening where we want to look, but don't want people to know we're looking. Quite strange (btw: I think this is really only applicable to personal blogs, not professional blogs).

I was at a party the other day and someone I didn't know came up to me and told me they read and enjoyed my blog, I felt a little uncomfortable and didn't really know what to say. Then my father apparently read my "Retired 2.0" entry and was asking me about the vacation I mentioned. You would think that wouldn't surprise me, but it did. I started writing this blog to put my thoughts in order for my thesis at Pratt, and was honestly not expecting anyone to really read it. But people are, both people who know me personally and professionals who don't know me at all and who are active in the design industry themselves.

When I just started this blog I immediately got an email from someone looking for the RSS feed (which I hadn't put in yet) and though I'm surprised at the amount of visitors this blog has generated (thanks to FeedBurner these numbers are a lot more accurate than the traditional page ticker) I'm definitely happy with the positive feedback I've received so far.

My generation apparently has a desire to be "connected" without the actual personal approach that a connection would normally require. We prefer text-messages over phone-calls, emails over letters, all things that have made interaction more impersonal, but now more than ever we have the desire for everyone to know what we're doing, at all times, from the interesting to the mundane.

Do we care if people read our blogs? Why DO we blog? I guess everybody has their own reasons. But thanks for reading this anyway...

Retired 2.0

Spent last week in Southern Florida, which besides sun+sea and a much needed vacation, provided some insight in what the current retired community thinks about this whole Web 2.0 thing.

At a dinner party with a bunch of retired folks I brought up the topic of Experience Design, and how the Design community is finally putting the consumer first. This brought up an interesting discussion about branding and the internet.

The people at the dinner party were in their late 60's, all products of the consumer boom of the 1950's, actively involved in the business world of the past 40 years, and lived through the mega-brand explosion of the 1980's. They still believed in buying a "respectable" and "trustworthy" brand. We spoke about fridges, cars and camera's and I realized that when it came to the more expensive items they were still very brand focused.

Nothing too out of the ordinary there.

Now here's for the interesting part, somebody said that the AARP magazine wrote a piece about how to buy the right brand of fridge, car or whatever. According to AARP, the best way to know what brand to buy is not to shop for prices, not to check out consumer reports, or consult your friends, but rather to call the customer service line of the brands you are considering, and pretend you have a defected item, and see how their customer service deals with the problem. AARP seems to think that's where the true value of a brand lies.

Interesting. I wonder if AOL would pass the test.

I asked them if any of them used the AARP website or if they read the magazine. They all said they read the magazine because the website is too confusing. So when I got home I toured the AARP website, and I have to agree with them, it is a bit confusing, even for an internet savvy person. Nobody at the dinner party knew what RSS was (one person had heard of it, but didn't really know how it worked) even though on the AARP website you can get an RSS feed. Seems like AARP's website is missing the mark a bit on the needs of their users.

The reason I think it's interesting to know how older generations use the web is because within 5 years all the baby-boomers will retire. They are much more internet savvy than their predecessors (the people I had dinner with), but maybe not as much as their kids. With the baby-boomers making up a large part of the community, they will probably be the first retired people who will make real use of the internet.

My parents are a good example of the generation that is about to retire. My father is very internet savvy, uses Firefox and tabbed browsing, subscribes to RSS feeds, and even has a daily newsletter (blog) he writes himself about Latin American politics. My mother is less internet savvy but still has a laptop, and mostly uses the web to write emails and shop for cheap airfare.

So now that everyone can be a writer, critic, or director on the internet, retired people with extra time on their hands have all the tools they need to stay informed, and share their knowledge.

Web 2.0 is not just for the young generation. If we say that everyone should be able to play, that means everyone. Don’t be surprised if a type of Facebook or Flickr more geared towards the baby-boom generation will start popping up soon.

Design for $5/hour

If I had a small firm, I would definitely not pay some American designer $40-$60/hour to design or code my website. I would go to a site like oDesk.com and get some Bulgarian, Polish, Indonesian, Pakistani or Indian designer to get me almost the exact result for as little as $5/hour. For an extra dollar at $6/hour you can get someone with 5 years of experience.

oDesk.com is super convenient, easy to use, and it would cost me less than if I would post an ad on craigslist.org. Anything I could possibly outsource I would. No doubt about it.

Why not? Are American designers really capable of delivering such better work?

Most design work (websites, identities etc.) can be learned by routine and repetition, done on free pirated software at home, and with a little bit of a creative eye you're ready to go. Besides I've seen some horrible crap designed by US designers who charged $50/hour and went to some fancy design school for 4 years. So I see nothing wrong with out-sourcing design work.

The tools of the trade are out there for everyone to use, and the truth is, it's just not that special anymore. You can design? So what. Everybody can now.

It's making the design industry extremely uncomfortable though, especially Design Schools that focus more on teaching software than they do on teaching "Creative Thinking". I guess it's hard to get away with charging 60k for an education that puts the graduate in competition with someone who gets paid $5 an hour.

Ouch... Might as well work at Starbucks then, at least they have benefits…

The beauty however, of all this outsourcing is that it just puts all of us designers on our toes. It forces us to think more about our place in the production cycle, and it forces us to become more like thinkers and strategists instead of simple-minded Adobe Computer Monkeys...

Maybe besides weeding out the not so great designers, it will manage to create some alternate views on what Design really means, or where it might be going… American Design's not dead yet. It's just morphing into something else. Something that's way more interesting anyway.